The present invention relates to an improvement in a phase detecting circuit and, more particularly, to a phase detecting circuit for detecting a differential in phase between a reference clock and a bit timing which is extracted from an analog signal, which is produced by demodulating a carrier wave modulated by a digital signal, e.g. . phase shift keying (PSK) carrier wave.
A phase detecting circuit of the type described suffers from a drawback that its phase detection characteristic has points of discontinuity which occur at some phase differentials. The discontinuity prevents a true phase differential from being achieved even if those samples which are scattered around that particular phase are averaged.